Conrad and Masculinity

112 Conrad and Masculinity
view of the establishment. Jeremy Hawthorn argues that Conrad
succumbs to pessimistic determinism in Nostromo, because he is
unwilling to entertain ‘the possibility of human beings changing their
social relationships so as to alter their material interest’. 28 This
tendency of the novel would accord with its amenability to
Foucauldian analysis, since Foucault’s account of power, like Conrad’s
account of ‘material interests’, can tend to make change seem impossible
because of the pervasiveness of trans-human forces. In Chapter 3
I contrasted Cixous’s celebratory account of a coinherence of body
and meaning with Foucault’s emphasis on the body as a site of social
inscription. A vision of the liberation of the male body from masculinity
as a discipline would then seem to require a male version of writing
the body. However, Stephen Heath argues that, because of male
power, there can be no equivalent for men of the political validity of
women’s emphasis on writing the body and a gendered discourse:
The truth about men and their bodies for the moment is merely
repetitive ... the régime of the same, the eternal problem of the
phallus, etc. ... Taking men’s bodies away from the existing representation
and its oppressive effects will have to follow women’s
writing anew of themselves. 29
The ‘moment’ of Heath writing this was 1986, since which time there
have been many developments in society, in feminist theory, in gay
and lesbian theory, and in the study of masculinity. It is therefore an
open question whether the situation described by Heath has changed:
whether, alongside a continuing analysis and critique of phallic
constructions of masculinity, there is now a place for the developing
of alternative models. The route to a writing of the male body would
seem to be through an understanding of homosexual desire and
homosocial bonds, and the complex relations between them. There is
a need, then, to examine traces of desire between men, as well as the
very various forms of bond between men, in Conrad’s fiction. This is
not in order to hint at some revelation about the ‘reality’ of Conrad’s
sexuality, but because same-sex desire is the excluded and repressed
term of normative masculinity – an excluded term which determines
many of its features. These issues will be taken up in more detail in
Chapters 7 and 8. At this point it is enough to observe the importance
of a number of homosocial bonds in Nostromo: Gould and his father
(N, 63, 66, 73); Nostromo and his surrogate father, Viola (548); Gould
and Holroyd (65).